Now that the Preds are out …

I picked the Nashville Predators to win the Stanley Cup, a reasonable pick I figured on the following bases:

1. Pekka Rinne, Shea Weber and Ryan Suter remind me of Martin Brodeur and Scotts Stevens and Niedermayer. I bounced this viewpoint off of both GM David Poile and coach Barry Trotz in separate one-on-one’s when the Predators were in town to face the Bruins this season, and they both lit up. Now Suter is UFA eligible and, according to some, trapped, tripped, packaged and shipped out … to Detroit. (… apologies to Robert Pollard)

2. Amidst a collection of contenders that are somehow too soon or too late or feeling too much pressure, the Preds have been building toward this for years (Trotz is the only coach in franchise history). It seemed right.

3. I decided on the pick before Alexander Radulov returned from Russia, but I was skeptical about the Alexei Kostitsyn pickup.

Bottom line: Mike Smith, he whom I hear was aloof in Tampa, is one of those goalies whose high end cuts through the clouds, and Nashville simply couldn’t finish against him.

Another pick bites the dust. The best pick I’ve made in the last several years seemed easy, but it was unique to me (ie. before the 2009-10 season I declared that neither Pittsburgh nor Detroit would make the 2010 final. … No team had been to the finals three years running since the 84-85 Edmonton Oilers … nuff said).

A few disorganized thoughts on the Bruins, the season and the state of the NHL …

On NHL labor:

Starting with a an aside from last Friday’s executive presser at TDG: I asked Bruins owner (and chairman of the boards of NHL governors) Jeremy Jacobs if the fact so many core players are under contract for next year (and beyond in some cases) is indicative of any confidence he might have that the NHL will play in the fall (the CBA expires in September). He understandably quipped about the fine he is guaranteed for speaking on negotiations and noted that the contracts are indicative of his confidence in the players themselves. At which point I asked what about 2002 (first in the conference, second in the league) and 2004 (second in the conference) when so many had been timed out to expire (ie. the 2004 lockout). Jacobs said, “You’d have to ask Harry Sinden, he’s seated right over there.”

Sinden quieted walked out of Legends as soon as the presser ended, but I wasn’t hoping for that conversation, only disappointed that I had possible snuffed out my own opportunity for a conversation ab0ut the game that I always relish with one of the sport’s masterminds. It no longer matters who decided what, but I’ll note at this point that, in my last Q&A with Jacobs about the infamous lockout strategy, he said that the Bruins were only following the directions that were given by the league to everyone. He played dumb on Friday and I made no big deal about it, but there is no denying the significance of this drastic change in business from the last time the Bruins approached a potential work stoppage.

On the Bruins:

GM Peter Chiarelli replaced the talent lost in Michael Ryder’s and Mark Recchi’s departures but not the grit. Benoit Pouliot is Gumby 2.0 (P.J. Axelsson), Brian Rolston wasn’t as soft as he was in his prime, but at 39 couldn’t replace physicality lost. Only Tyler Seguin’s very last goal of the season provided a glimmer that he may become more than a peripheral sniper. Minus Nathan Horton and Adam McQuaid, the Bruins simply lacked the collective thump that wore down their playoff opponents last year.
It was a tried-and-true formula for the 2011 Cup run, and however unfair to ask the same of the 2012 team, it became an impossible task minus all those hard shoulders.

Moreover, for any realistic chance at a repeat (unheard of in this era), the Bruins needed something at the outset that could ease the game on all their players, and the only thing that had a shot at doing that was an elite puck-moving defenseman — stop me if you’ve heard this one before. (BTW, I stand in the minority that believe Tomas Kaberle helped them win the Cup last year and that, with Dennis Wideman or Joe Corvo they would have failed). Coming into this sequel season, a big-time PMD was their only shot.

Look at past champions: the Flyers went out and got Reggie Leach, making a lot of wins easier in the sequel season for them, other champs have taken on similar stances. Pittsburgh ditching Coffey and adding muscle in Kjell Samuelsson. Detroit minus Vladimir Konstantinov plus Jamie Macoun is not an upgrade, but with a different goalie (Chris Osgood instead of Mike Vernon) there was an altered dynamic in their game. The Bruins made no key changes, attempting to get back with the same players in all key positions and with the same formula for success.

That approach actually makes sense for next year (with the long summer and time to refresh), but it left them with no reasonable chance this year. I don’t agree with anyone who think Tim Thomas or David Krejci or any other star player should be moved at this time. Last year would have been the time to make any such change, and I would have only sought to fill the PMD spot with a 2-3 instead of a 5-6.

On the state of the game:

Good games are good games, and bad games are bad games. Beyond the obvious, the tiresome cycle (no pun intended) of patterns only to lead to another blocked shot tells me what I always believed: that the post-lockout rule changes (and line/zone changes) cannot address the simple fact that never changes: as Cam Neely noted in his post-presser scrum, it’s way easier to prevent goals than it is to score them. Intensify that with the fact that coaches lose their jobs when they allow an unusual number of goals, and the gravitational pull is insurmountable. Defense cannot be compromised by the competitors, and the more they try to legislate offense into the game, the harder coaches work at playing defense.

They’re not going to outlaw game coaching and give the run of the rink back to the players (although that would lead to less consistent and stringent adherence to defensive techniques, and at the same time open up the game to ingenuity/creativity). I would like to see it, but it won’t happen. Seems the NHL’s summer thinktank makes the same mistake every year: putting two teams of hockey players on a rink with some new rules and giving them 60 minutes to decide what it takes coaching staffs months to determine — how to counteract the disadvantages that come with the rules changes invoked. I actually believe they should take the reverse path and make it easy to defend so coaches will spend 90 percent of their time trying to score instead of the other way around.

On player safety:

To whatever extent concussions are actually on the increase (not just the diagnoses of them), I blame it mostly on modern stick technology. Most concussions I see are the product of the puck — not the players — going too fast. It used to be that, when a peewee got caught with his head down, the coach would say, “Son, you’re not going to make it in this game if you don’t learn to skate with your head up.” Now everyone has that problem because every player can pass the puck 70 miles an hour and shoot it 90.

What was for so long a rarity of power has been rendered marginal by the fact that they make hockey sticks out of the same crap they use to manufacture tennis racquets and golf-club shafts. The difference is some players have the hands to finesse the puck and most don’t. And those who don’t relay it as fast as possible. The result of that is everyone’s head is on a swivel, and at the speed NHL players move it around (picture that moment of blur in an air-hockey game) it’s inevitable that someone cannot follow it and keep an eye out for a predatory or accidental collision.

I vote the sport’s think tank puts wooden sticks in the hands of the players this summer and let the speed of the game be once again defined by the players’ ability to skate rather than the pinball effect of the puck. It’s already proven that the speed of the puck doesn’t produce more goals, so they’ve got nothing to lose except some head injuries.

On the rules and the rink:

For 30 years I’ve been hearing that players are bigger, faster and stronger, that 200×85 just cannot contain them anymore, and if this were 1 percent true, the players’ heads wouldn’t fit under the roof of the arena. In fact, size is down in the NHL thanks to the enforcement standards that took much of the clutch-and-grab out of hockey starting in 2005-06. I’ve always adhered to the belief that these increased enforcement standards — and not zone size, no red line or any other gimmick — are why the game has some open pockets now that it did not have from the early 90′s through 2004.
The consistency with which goaltenders and team defenses are timing out their shot blocks show me that a faster game is not necessarily a better game.

The first hockey I watched was prior to the ’67 expansion, so it’s no wonder I prefer a game with a little more puck handling and a little more on-ice thinking rather than programmed thinking. Programmed was fascinating when the Bruins played the Soviet Red Army in ’76 for instance (or the Soviet Wings, who kicked their Lunch Pail butts on Bobby Orr Night). Hockey has always had fascinating (and sometimes annoying) patterns, from the days when you’d watch a college game on TV on a Saturday afternoon and one guy would stickhandle his way around the outside of the rink and hold the puck for what seemed like an eternity until it was some other dangler’s turn. Then there are those times when the game seems exactly as it was many moons ago. Around the time when the Devils were a controversial team with Jacques Lemaire’s strict application of the 1-2-2 lateral trap, I visited the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. One of the items was a living room set up to display a 1950′s family watching the Canadiens. I caught some of the game and — there it was — the 1-2-2. Turns out the coaches who insisted it was nothing new were right. Further lookbacks at Montreal’s Lemaire-coached sweep of the favored Bruins in 1984 — Tom Fergus scored Boston’s only two goals, bringing down the curtain on the great expectations of the early 80′s painter’s cap Bruins. Hockey has twisted and reshaped in several different signature contortions since, and when systems are tweaked into particularly disabling styles of play (to an opponents’ offense), and that disabling team wins, media and fans frighten me as they clamor for some drastic change that, they think, will forever fix what ails us most when watching it.

Alas, there is no magic fix. Hockey was evolving the moment any of us first laid eyes on it, and everyone’s got their own crystal moment of exquisite perfection for the game’s context, character and atmosphere. I’m partial to mine, as I’m sure you are yours.

Bottom line: There is a core to the game that I believe should always be kept in mind when evaluating change so that, over a series of changes, the game doesn’t at some point look even remotely related to what any of us loved about it to begin with.

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Blog Author

Mick Colageo

Mick Colageo grew up in East Walpole, Mass., skating on Coburn's Pond and at 4 Seasons Arena. He has been writing about hockey since 1986 and covering the Bruins since 1991, is a voting member of the Professional Hockey Writers Association, and ... Read Full